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cables are all facing the same and correct way,
so that they face the motherboard tray once
the radiator is installed. This will enable you to
feed the cables directly through the cable-
routing holes and minimise any unsightly
cable spaghetti. You also need to make sure
the fans are on the correct side of the radiator.
(^6) REMOVE REDUNDANT
CASE PANELS
A lot of cases now include optional panels and
other components that you can chop and
change depending on the style of your build.
This is a good stage to make sure your case is
setup how you want, as you don’t want find
after installing most of your cooling system
that you’ve blocked a panel that needs to
come out, meaning you need to remove
everything to get at it. Areas to look out for
include sections of the PSU cover that
make way for radiators or, in our case, a
cable cover that reveals the side-mounted
radiator location.
(^7) INSTALL RADIATORS
To install the radiators, you’ll need the right
screws. Mounting a radiator so that it exhausts
from your case usually requires the shorter
screws, as you’re just bolting the radiator to
your case. That’s what we’re doing here, as
we’re placing radiators in the roof and side
mounts, shifting air out of the case.
(^8) REMOVE GPU COOLER
You can see last issue’s guide for more details
on how to dismantle the RTX 3080 Founders
Edition, but we recommend duct tape or 3M
mounting tape to remove the magnetic screw
caps in the casing. After this, dismantling the
card is straightforward. The Corsair
waterblock we’ve used has its pads and paste
pre-applied, which saves a lot of time.
(^9) FIT GPU WATERBLOCK
All you need to do is clean the GPU core and
memory modules, remove any stray thermal
pads and place these back onto the original
heatsink; then place the waterblock on top.
Follow the instructions on how to secure it and
the backplate. Once it’s mounted, go ahead
and install the graphics card. We’ve used a
riser cable to mount our graphics card
vertically, so it’s visible through the
side window.
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